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Statement:
Smart energy technologies, such as solar panels, electric vehicles and fuel cells have great potential, but have only begun to deliver the broad-scale environmental and economic benefits needed in the world. Even in the Bay Area, fossil fuel energy use and GHG emissions continue to rise (BAAQMD 2011).
Achieving results on a large scale will take a system-wide approach, technology integration, policies and practice, and customer engagement. For instance, integrated customer tools and electricity rate structure incentives are critical to realizing the benefits of smart meter investments. And grid management, optimization and reliability enhancements are needed to incorporate expansion of distributed and renewable power sources.
Customer requirements vary widely, and new technology carries cost and risk. Collaboration is essential in bringing the right parties together, and to serve as force-multiplier in confronting shared integration, process, and policy-related challenges.

Summary:
Working with a committed group of corporate, institutional, governmental and utility stakeholders, Joint Venture Silicon Valley has launched the Smart Energy Enterprise Development Zone initiative, known by the acronym SEEDZ. This collaboration is now hard at work, defining and building the country's leading commercial power network measured in terms of both performance and reliability.
The initial geographic area of focus for SEEDZ is north Mountain View, Moffett Field, and north Sunnyvale. This zone is well-suited as model area for smart energy integration, with over 300 commercial energy customers including many leading high technology companies such as Google, Juniper Networks, NetApp and Yahoo!. Extensive development is planned for this area in the coming years, and it is already home to hundreds of EV charging stations, and more than 13 megawatts of distributed generation capacity from solar, landfill, digester gas, fuel cells, and other sources.
Joint Venture Silicon Valley's SEEDZ initiative aims to build a community-scale “smart energy” network of the future. It will demonstrate and deliver leading power performance and sustainability benefits on a commercially-based, community-wide scale. SEEDZ includes a portfolio of eight essential smart energy elements, covering practices, standards and technologies, for efficiency, renewable energy, grid performance, and business model integration.
More specifically, these eight elements include integrated building systems, distributed generation, demand programs, electric transport, grid infrastructure, storage and backup, incentives and financing and interoperability standards. The scope of these elements are summarized below:
- Integrated building systems include advanced HVAC/lighting, energy management systems, automated load shifting, and continuous commissioning.
- Distributed generation encompasses onsite (potentially shared) solar PV, fuel cells, biogas, SWH, DG/grid integration, district heatong/cooling.
- Electric transport includes EV charging and fueling infrastructure, smart charging programs, and EV grid impacts/integration.
- Storage and backup includes consideration of both thermal and electric storage, and backup, DG/islanding integration, and opportunities for rate arbitrage and ancillary servies.
- Incentives and financing includes development incentives and standards, availability and piloting of PACE, on-bill financing, and other commercial structures.
- Interoperability standards include building energy management and utility integration standards, DG and storage integration, and NIST smart grid standards.
- Grid infrastructure includes power quality monitoring, advanced distribution automation, and self-healing.
- Demand programs include scaled adoption of DR and ADR, and advancement of new dynamic pricing models.
Between now and 2020, SEEDZ goals include improving reliability and affordability, reducing local greenhouse gas emissions by expanding use of grid-effective clean and distributed sources of energy, and increased electrification of transport.
SEEDZ also seeks to provide global market expansion and brand enhancement for SEEDZ collaborators, attract additional investment and research funding, as a hub for development/deployment of advanced solutions.

Why it should be recognized:
SEEDZ represents a replicable example for the country and the world. It is attracting both public and private investment. And most importantly, it is consolidating and driving real economic and environmental benefits on a community-wide scale.
This group is working in collaboration- customer driven, commercially based, bottoms-up, research-savvy and results-oriented. And with a high profile cross-section of players involved, the group wields influence in program and policy matters. SEEDZ aims to help California meet its RPS (33% by 2020) and help Bay Area agencies and municipalities meet climate action plan and greenhouse gas reduction objectives. This can serve as a model for other regions.
A wide range of stakeholder groups have come together around SEEDZ, including corporate energy customers such as Juniper Networks, NetApp, Google; utilities/energy providers, such as PG&E; governmental entities, such as the cities of Mountain View and Sunnyvale; research institutions, such as the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), solution providers, such as Cypress Envirosystems, SunPower, and Optony, and property concerns such as University Associates, NASA Ames Research Park, and the Moffett Park Business Group.

2 comments:

On
Apr 03, 2013
robert.cormia said:
Only through an integrative systems approach can you achieve systemic change. The emphasis on community energy projects, integrated demand side management, and ultra high efficiency buildings, leveraging clean locally generated electricity, is key to achieving significant energy and GHG reductions. SEEDZ is an instance of an emerging electricity model, and the electron economy.

On
Feb 21, 2013
robert.means said:
Although such a shotgun approach to reducing energy through a wide variety of technologies, programs and incentives will yield incremental energy savings, the un-focused nature of this project promises only evolutionary improvement.